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CoasterForce's favourite UK roller coasters

1. Wicker Man (whole package: great theming, atmospheric, fun ride)

2. Stealth (fast thing goes whoosh)

3. Oblivion (love a good drop)

4. Nemesis (despite my comments in the Least Common opinion thread I still enjoy it a lot)

5. Nemesis Inferno (I think it's pretty close to Nemesis)

6. Th13teen
7. Vampire
8. The Swarm
9. Dragon's Fury
10. The Walking Dead (I love it...fight me!)
 
1. Nemesis
2. Swarm
3. Oblivion
4. Ultimate
5. Dragon's Fury
6. Nemesis Inferno
7. Megafobia
8. Millennium
9. Icon
10. Tornado
 
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1) Nemesis
2) Icon
3) Stealth
4) Wickerman
5) Swarm
6) Nemesis Inferno
7) Oblivion
From here on it’s pretty much judged entirely on nostalgia...
8) PMBO (My first tall coaster)
9) Grand National (My first woodie, and the first time I fell in love with airtime, I swear it didn’t have belts back then, did it?)
10) Air! (Opened in my first year working at AT)

I haven’t thought too hard about this list, I don’t really rank coasters beyond my top 20, and I think only Nemesis and Icon currently break into that...
 
1. Stealth
2. Oblivion
3. Nemesis
4. Swarm
5. Wild Mouse
6. Ultimate
7. Speed
8. Dragon's Fury
9. Vampire
10. Megafobia
 
1. Nemesis, obvs.
2. The Swarm.
3. Stealth.
4. Oblivion.
5. Icon.
6. Nemesis Inferno.
7. Wicker Dude.
8. T'Ultimate.
9. The Smiler.
10. Saw.
 
Just a reminder; if you’d like to participate in this, you only have 2 days left to submit your lists!
 
1. Nemesis
2. Stealth
3. Wicker man
4. Nemesis Inferno
5. Swarm
6. Oblivion
7. Big One
8. Thirteen
9. Dragon
10. Smiler

After 4 that was surprisingly difficult!
 
1 - Wicker Man
2 - Oblivion
3 - Stealth
4 - Icon
5 - Nemesis
6 - Smiler (but only on the front row, everywhere else is hideous)
7 - Rita
8 - Nemesis Inferno
9 - Saw
10 - Swarm
 
1- Icon
2- Big One
3- Avalanche
4- Big Dipper
5- Velocity
6- Infusion
7- Grand National
8- Nickelodeon Streak
9- Steeplechase
10- Revolution
 
Right, then; the results are in! Apologies for the delay, but I have now compiled the results of my little experiment, and they're very interesting, to say the least! I could likely have told you number 1 without even conducting the poll, so that one should come as no real surprise, but some of the results lower down surprised me, I must admit!

All in all, 24 of you ranked 41 different roller coasters in your lists, and the top 10 are as follows:
  1. Nemesis at Alton Towers (B&M, 1994, Final Score 0.09710743802)
  2. Stealth at Thorpe Park (Intamin, 2006, Final Score 0.2160493827)
  3. Icon at Blackpool Pleasure Beach (Mack Rides, 2018, Final Score 0.2222222222)
  4. The Swarm at Thorpe Park (B&M, 2012, Final Score 0.2325)
  5. Nemesis Inferno at Thorpe Park (B&M, 2003, Final Score 0.2686980609)
  6. Oblivion at Alton Towers (B&M, 1998, Final Score 0.2725)
  7. Wicker Man at Alton Towers (GCI, 2018, Final Score 0.3472222222)
  8. The Smiler at Alton Towers (Gerstlauer, 2013, Final Score 0.5694444444)
  9. The Ultimate at Lightwater Valley (Big Country Motioneering, 1991, Final Score 0.7142857143)
  10. Galactica at Alton Towers (B&M, 2002, Final Score 0.74)
I don't know whether you'd agree, but I think that is a very interesting top 10, and when limited to UK coasters, it brings up some very interesting contrasts with the overall list that was done at the end of 2019. For starters, the most favoured UK coasters seem to be somewhat older than the most favoured coasters overall, with the average ride in the top 10 having opened in 2006 (mean of all the opening years was 2005.5, so I just rounded up), compared with an average of 2014 for the worldwide top 10 in 2019 (mean was 2013.8), suggesting that Britain's most well liked coasters were built some time ago in comparison to the whole world's most well liked coasters, on average.

To back this up further, the worldwide top 10 had only 2 roller coasters built pre-2010, and only 4 built pre-2015, while Britain's top 10 had only 4 roller coasters built post-2010 and only 2 built post-2015; the favourites in Britain are somewhat older on the whole than the favourites worldwide, for sure!

We also have very different manufacturers making up the UK top 10. By far the most well-liked manufacturer in Britain is B&M, for whom all 5 of their British coasters make the top 10 in some capacity. Leaving B&M out of the equation, no other manufacturer has got any more than 1 coaster that makes the top 10. In the worldwide top 10, there was only 1 B&M, with companies like RMC and Intamin dominating.

There's tons more I could talk about, but I'd be here for hours, so here's the spreadsheet with the full ranking and my workings out. If anyone notices any errors, don't hesitate to tell me:
docs.google.com

CoasterForce's Favourite UK Rollercoasters

docs.google.com docs.google.com

For clarity, I calculated final score by dividing the mean ranking by the amount of riders.

I hope you enjoy the results of my little experiment, and thank you so much to everyone who participated and sent in lists!
P.S. For comparison, here is the worldwide ranking from last year that some of the team did: http://forums.coasterforce.com/threads/coasterforces-favorite-coasters-2019-edition.44048/
 
Thank you for your work @Matt N, really interesting to see the full list and see where some of the lesser talked out about coasters rank for us ☺
 
Nice work @Matt N, the list looks pretty reasonable as far as #9, glad to see The Ultimate getting some appreciation. I'm shocked Galactica made it in at #10 though, not sure that would even make my UK top 25.
 
Peet said:
Nice work @Matt N, the list looks pretty reasonable as far as #9, glad to see The Ultimate getting some appreciation. I'm shocked Galactica made it in at #10 though, not sure that would even make my UK top 25.
Click to expand...
It’s all down to personal opinion, really; Galactica is my UK #7 out of 41 UK roller coasters ridden, so I rank it more highly among the UK coasters than the average CFer does!
 
Good work crunching the numbers there, Matt. Maybe we've got a future CF spreadsheet enthusiast on our hands. You can take over the League of Goons one from me one day. ;)
 
Serena said:
Damn, I saw this too late! I would just like to add:

1. SAW
Click to expand...
Don’t fret @Serena; out of the 41 roller coasters ranked, Saw: The Ride only narrowly missed the top 10, coming in at #13! And it still had a final score of below 1, which I’d say is really positive!
Hixee said:
Good work crunching the numbers there, Matt. Maybe we've got a future CF spreadsheet enthusiast on our hands. You can take over the League of Goons one from me one day. ;)
Click to expand...
Thanks @Hixee; I absolutely love collecting this type of data, and this was just as interesting for me as I hope it was for you! I must admit, I actually borrowed the same idea as the team on CF used for the favourite coasters of 2019 and did the same thing on TowersStreet, the other forum I’m signed up to!

So collecting theme park-related data (and data in general, to be fair) is something that really interests me, I must admit, hence why I’ve made many of the site’s poll topics! I love hearing other people’s opinions on things and how they compare with my own!
 
I really apreciate the work you put into this, and after a little bit of time I understood your way of calculation.
However, this raised on issue with the resulting ranking: If I got this correct, you divided the average position in the rankings with the amount of times a ride has been put into the rankings.
That creates one isse: If a ride is not ranked in someones Top 10, it is considered "not ridden", even though it was just considered too "bad" to make the list.
For example: If 20 people would have ranked the Spinning Mouse on Blackpools South Pier their no. 1, and 20 other people would not have it even in their top 10, but different coasters, it would still make the #1 spot in the list as you just consider 20 riders instead of 40.

Maybe you might change this for future polls, so every coaster not in the Top 10 is calculated as 11 or even larger (15? 20?) for the calculations.
 
Trax said:
I really apreciate the work you put into this, and after a little bit of time I understood your way of calculation.
However, this raised on issue with the resulting ranking: If I got this correct, you divided the average position in the rankings with the amount of times a ride has been put into the rankings.
That creates one isse: If a ride is not ranked in someones Top 10, it is considered "not ridden", even though it was just considered too "bad" to make the list.
For example: If 20 people would have ranked the Spinning Mouse on Blackpools South Pier their no. 1, and 20 other people would not have it even in their top 10, but different coasters, it would still make the #1 spot in the list as you just consider 20 riders instead of 40.

Maybe you might change this for future polls, so every coaster not in the Top 10 is calculated as 11 or even larger (15? 20?) for the calculations.
Click to expand...
I wasn’t sure how to do it, really. The team uses a similar methodology for the worldwide poll, so I thought it might work well. The only other way I could think of was mean rankings, but that creates issues because if only 1 person ranks a ride their number 1, then it automatically wins, because that’s the best mean ranking you can have, but this wouldn’t accurately reflect the site’s opinions as a whole.

I appreciate that the methodology may not be perfect, but I think it’s the best method I could think of to do it, personally.
 
Yes, I the issue. Hence why I had the idea of just giving a coaster, that did not make it into someone’s list a score higher than 10 (and maybe require a minimum amount of votes into the top 10 to be considered for the list).
The issue which needs to be resolved here, is what happens if someone did not vote for the coaster because it has not been ridden. Do you vote that one down, because it could not be taken into account for a ranking? Difficult, and I don’t blame you for the way you chose to do it. Maybe we can discuss some ideas for future polls?
 
Hi @Matt N, thanks for putting this together. I love a bit of ranking and it's always interesting to see the results.

I hope you don't mind but I ran your data through a pair comparison ranking similar to the old Mitch Hawker method to see if things would come out any differently.

I did spot in your calculations that Icon had a higher average score than Stealth (which makes sense as it topped more lists), but the amount of times that Stealth appeared in total overruled this, so @Trax is right to point out the uncertainty over whether something has been ridden or not.
The method I used doesn't change that (nothing short of asking everyone to list every UK coaster they have ridden would), but it does bury it as a non-issue - the frequency with which a ride appears in lists does not affect the result.

It looks a little something like this anyway:

Win rate
1Nemesis1
2Icon0.968
Wild Mouse (BPB)0.857
3Stealth0.833
4Wicker Man0.826
5The Swarm0.813
6Nemesis Inferno0.788
7The Ultimate0.636
8Oblivion0.625
9Big One (BPB)0.571
10Thirteen0.526

I've left Wild Mouse out of the official lineup as it wasn't made clear whether we were including defunct or not, so it may have just been left off a bunch of lists. I also had to remove a few outliers that only appeared in one list, as with most systems of this nature they just don't have enough data to give an accurate representation.
 
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